By Megan Long Westberg | From the July/August 2026 issue of Strings
Jascha Heifetz taught in a wood-paneled hexagon designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s. Wright also designed his desk. The soft furniture, a gentle turquoise, stood in contrast to the redbrick fireplace and liquid-jet piano, which occupied the space adjacent to a bank of windows. A checkerboard floor peeked out from under a large neutral area rug. And with nary a right angle in sight, the man himself sat in a black leather chair behind his designer desk, perhaps watching something on the built-in tv.
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Originally a feature of the violinist’s Beverly Hills property, the Heifetz studio was dismantled piece by piece after his death in 1987, stored for some years, and then rebuilt inside Los Angeles’ Colburn School. A building within a building. You can visit it. (You cannot, however, sit in Heifetz’s desk chair—this is strictly forbidden, according to the professor currently teaching in the studio, Robert Lipsett, who claims he’s never sat there either). It is, more or less, just as Heifetz left it. So as I introduce myself via Zoom to violinist María Dueñas, in L.A. to perform at Disney Hall and who just released her third album, Homage to Heifetz, I wonder if she’s going to stop by.
When I ask her, she laughs. “No, I’ve never been, actually. I should! I somehow never have time to go.” This makes sense. She’s rather a busy soloist these days, and given her schedule, it would seem she spends almost as much time in the air between venues as she does onstage. (This would be something she perhaps shares with her violin hero, who, by his own reckoning, traveled more than two million miles from the time of his birth in 1901 to a 1947 sabbatical.) Plus she got to play one of Heifetz’s violins as a part of the recording process, so perhaps his office furniture doesn’t hold quite the same fascination as it might otherwise.
Dueñas has a complicated relationship with the title of her recording. “How do you come up with a title that’s honoring Heifetz but not putting myself on the same line as Heifetz, because that’s impossible?” she says. She’s clear throughout our conversation: This album is not an attempt to replicate his recordings or imitate his technique. Strictly speaking, the album isn’t really even meant to be about Heifetz. It’s meant to honor her roots, and Heifetz is a part of her violin origin story.
Dueñas came from a family of music lovers, but not musicians. Her family’s recording collection was predominated by opera, her mother’s passion, but also included violinists playing music both old and new. “I would say that Heifetz and Oistrakh were the main pillars in our collection. Also, of course, Menuhin.” Dueñas listened to Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky in the car on the way to school, and once she’d been taken by her parents to an orchestral concert in Granada, her hometown, she was hooked. “I said, that’s what I want to do too,” she recalls.
Her early musical upbringing taught her to hear the difference between the violinists in her family’s vinyl collection. Her favorite? You guessed it—though it’s hard for her to pinpoint exactly what it was that set his work apart in her mind so early in life (she started playing when she was six). “I think it was a lot of the personality in the sound, and also a lot of risk taking as well,” she says, adding that she was especially impressed with the way Heifetz played Bach. “Bach was played with a lot of freedom. And I would say that was just very unique compared to everything else that I was listening to.”
Now that she’s a trained musician, she doesn’t point to his technique as the element of his playing that most intrigues her. It’s the man vs. the musician. “When you look at him, in videos or even when he was teaching—there are some recordings from when he was talking to his students [on] phone calls—he seems to be a rather cold person,” she says. “But when you listen to his playing, it’s not cold. It’s really warm and very emotional as well, and so I think that’s really interesting. That’s kind of, I would say, a part of himself that he doesn’t necessarily show in person, but through the music, it’s like a totally different world of himself that he’s presenting. So I find it really inspiring, and, in the end, it’s a very honest way of playing.”
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Her impression of Heifetz’s personal style being at odds with his playing style isn’t unique. According to pianist Eugene Istomin (1925–2003), in a 1987 interview with Bernard Meillat, musical advisor to the Pau Casals Foundation and former director of Musiq3, Heifetz was a downright “miraculous” musician and “almost an obsession” with him for a time. “Nevertheless,” he mused, “Heifetz and I couldn’t be more different. No introspection in him. He was not at all an intellectual; he was very simple, very selfish, quite unlikeable. But the intensity of his playing was like that of a big cat: powerful, dangerous, and amazingly beautiful.”
But perhaps the more uncompromising elements of his personality were integral ingredients that made up his extraordinary special sauce, as it were. To be oneself takes courage. And with technique mastered to a degree generally considered unprecedented, Heifetz is also a touchstone for Dueñas in terms of his musical fearlessness. She sees in his playing “the inspiration of freedom.” She goes on: “It doesn’t seem, somehow, inside a box. I feel like nowadays, we have a lot of measurements—I don’t know how to put it—but it feels like he would do whatever he was feeling like, and I think that’s very inspiring.”
If listeners hear a similar sense of freedom in her album, it would no doubt please her, but she doesn’t take her cues directly from his recordings. “I think it’s impossible to copy Heifetz—or anyone for that matter,” she says. “I would say, the more you try, the less it works. I think it’s impossible to even come close to his artistry.”
Dueñas’ album centers on Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D major. This is in keeping with her desire to honor her roots. Heifetz recorded these works as a pair, and it’s one of the first albums Dueñas remembers from her childhood. “Of course, it’s a very unusual pairing,” she says, “like, Lalo and Korngold [do] not necessarily [often go] together historically but also musically.”
These pieces do share a subtle conceptual link, however. Both take form as two things at once. The Symphonie espagnole, for example, was written by a French composer but is considered his Spanish symphony (another way in which Dueñas draws on her roots—“I really wanted an album where I honor Spain”). And so in approaching the five-movement work, she was inspired by two sets of influences. “I think it’s important to keep this French elegance in some parts,” she says. “So, of course, it’s Spanish, and I hear a lot of Sarasate [for whom it was written] and a lot of Spanish influence, but it’s still French music in a way.”
Korngold, celebrated for his film scoring, wrote a concerto that combines a Hollywood sensibility—going so far as to include themes and motives from his scores to Another Dawn, Juarez, Anthony Adverse, and The Prince and the Pauper—with the composer’s own musical upbringing. Again, two sets of influences. “I hear some Viennese elegance,” says Dueñas. “He, of course, spent a lot of time in Austria as well.” Indeed he did, despite his Tinseltown credentials and sometime address; born in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, he lived specifically in Vienna for more than 25 of his 60 years.
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Dueñas is sure that anyone in compare-and-contrast mode will find her Lalo and Korngold quite different than Heifetz’s. “Of course, when it comes to the Lalo, I mean, I’m a Spanish violinist, and there are a lot of things that kind of come naturally to me, so I would say that it is quite different to his playing. In the end, I think that’s also great. I wasn’t trying to imitate it. It’s very hard, but I feel like I managed to put some very personal roots in my recording.”
That’s not to say, however, that she didn’t study certain desirable outcomes that stemmed from his approach. “I feel like he very much has this warm Hollywood kind of sound for the Korngold. It fits so well because it’s a very dreamy sound. And I was actually listening to the beginning of Korngold and just trying to grab what kind of atmosphere he has around, because it has also to do with the orchestra . . . which is somehow very vibrant behind him, and that was something that I really wanted to achieve or come close to in my recording.”
Behind Dueñas was the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, led by the ensemble’s artistic and musical director, Gustavo Dudamel, with whom Dueñas has worked before, but not on this repertoire. Involving Dudamel in this project was important to the violinist, especially in making sure this recording felt “close to home.” “Our roots are very similar,” she says, “like, culturally we kind of feel the music the same way.” She also credits the maestro with bringing everyone together and channeling the orchestra’s motivation and excitement. “When he’s very excited or convinced about something, he manages to convince everyone else the same amount,” she says.
“I would say that his willingness to work until the last second and into every detail and with a lot of energy really translated into the orchestra, and that was very important to keep everyone on fire, really.”
The rest of Homage to Heifetz is made up of what Dueñas refers to as “these little signature pieces from Heifetz”: three pieces by Claude Debussy (La fille aux cheveux de lin from Préludes I, La plus que lente, and La chevelure from Chansons de Bilitis) and Manuel Ponce’s sweet, sentimental Estrellita.
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“I feel like Debussy was a composer that Heifetz really brought to life,” Dueñas says. Her consideration of Heifetz’s connection with Debussy’s music led her to another idea. If the recording is an homage to Heifetz, would it be possible to play one of his instruments?
It was.
Enter the 1731 “Heifetz, Piel” Stradivari violin to take centerstage in the Debussy pieces. The instrument also has a possible connection to another piece on the album: “Heifetz premiered the Korngold when he owned this violin, so it might have been on this one,” says Dueñas. Her approach with the Strad was different than her accustomed routine with a borrowed instrument. Usually she practices a lot to get to know the instrument. This time, she did not. “I felt that if I was practicing a lot, it would kind of lose its spirit somehow because when I tried it for the first time, I was so impressed. It was really beautiful sounding and, like, wow, and I didn’t want to lose this first-time feeling, so in the end, I didn’t really practice much on it.” She was pleased with how it turned out. “I feel like it really came alive in the moment.”
We chat a little about unexpected Heifetz trivia (for example, under the name Jim Hoyl, he wrote a pop hit in 1946 that was recorded by Bing Crosby) and come around to what’s next for Dueñas. And it sounds like there’s a lot. In addition to touring, she tries to learn two to three new concertos every season. She wants to champion little-known and create new pieces and tackle obscure chamber music. But her most foundational goals are simple and serve as reminders that she is an artist still in the early years of her career: “In general, there are lots of audiences I haven’t played for yet, so that’s a very long road ahead of me,” she says. “And ultimately, the goal is just to make people happy with my music.”
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